Monthly Archives: May 2012

An ancient Mayan astronomy lab was recently discovered within a Guatemalan rainforest.

In a couple of my posts below, I talk about the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar and its relationship to those civilizations studying the sky over long periods of time.

This calendar is amazing for an ancient people because it accurately predicts the 26,000 year cycle of axial precession of our planet. The movements of the planet Venus and our Moon are also tracked over time.

The long count calendar, which originates with the Olmec civilization, was thought to have ended in December 2012. However U.S. scientists working at a site in Guatemala have recently uncovered a calendar that shows the Sun cycles continuing for billions more years. At this site named Xultun, located in Mayan ruins within a rainforest, an astronomy lab was also discovered which shows calculations drawn on the wall by ancient math/astronomy geeks.

Check out the imbedded links above for more information and pictures.

I have been following more research and articles to the mystery of the Sun’s poles going asymetric (which is happening this month, see post below) and apparently more researchers are correlating this with cooling events in the Earth’s past.

If you have been following the news at all, you are aware of the massive Sun spots we are now seeing that are ejecting solar flares at Earth.

The updated (May 2012) solar prediction chart from NASA is pictured to the left and we are almost at the peak of solar cycle 24.

The Greek philosopher Plato wrote of the legendary city of Atlantis in his dialogues of Critias and Timaeus. Scholars debate whether or not Plato fabricated this story of Atlantis to be told as a parable or if the story was based on an actual myth from antiquity.

In any regard, there have been hundreds of books, magazine articles, blogs, television shows, documentaries, alien conspiracies and other works produced that have tried to correlate the Atlantis legend to a location on a map.

Nothing mystical, nothing magical, just sea rise and the tendency for humans to settle and construct defensive formation on shorelines; getting covered up by water over time as the polar caps and glaciers melt and freeze during interglacial periods.

I have been following the discovery of underwater sites for quite a few years. Each time one of these sites is found, some skeptic will show up and do their best to debunk the site as a naturally occurring formation. I believe in a healthy amount of skepticism, but sometimes skeptics also resort to speculation when trying to dismiss potential discoveries.

Take for example, the underwater rock formations of Yonaguni. The Yonaguni underwater rock formations are located to the south of Japan and east of Taiwan. The top of the formation is about 5 meters below the surface and extends down another 20 meters. Skeptics of Yonaguni proclaim that it is no different than the Giant’s Causeway, or perhaps Old Rag Mountain. But if you visit the links for those formations or do some image searching, you won’t see anything similar to Yonaguni. To me, Yonaguni looks more like Machu Picchu (pictured below) than something obviously created by nature such as Giant’s Causeway. One of the skeptical arguments related to the Yonaguni site is that earthquakes caused the rock to shear into geometric shapes, which is possible of course.

In 1954, Leicester Hemmingway (Ernest Hemmingway’s brother), took an airplane from the United States to Havana, Cuba. Hemingway was looking out the window of the plane and at one point exclaimed “A city of glistening marble” was visible below the sea. He then spent the next forty years of his life looking for it, but never found it. In 2009, a team of researchers found what they believe to be a sunken city in the western Carribean; roughly 40-70 feet below the surface of the water.

At 40 to 70 feet below the surface, this site close to Havana would be roughly 4-9 thousand years old.

I talk to people who often tell me, “We know more about space than our own oceans. We should spend more time examining the oceans.” There is a certain wisdom to those words as we seem to discover things thought previously improbable by science.

It seems that new species are discovered such as once thought to be extinct plants and sea life, giant squids and extremophiles each time we set out to explore the ocean’s depths.

The Transit of Venus against our Sun will be viewable June 5-6th, 2012. This won’t happen again during our lives.

As I discuss in the post below on Sun myths, humans have studied the sky and Earth over long periods of time to look for patterns. Some ancient cultures recorded those patterns as they were important for planting, harvesting, navigation and many other activities.

Today, observers of the heavens have much better tools at their disposal than those available thousands of years ago. The use of telescopes has helped us to understand the last few hundred years pretty well and the patterns, such as sun spots, that allow future solar activity to be predicted.

2012 affords us some rare and interesting sky gazing opportunities. Starting this week, and especially on May 5th (Saturday night), a Super Full Moon will be viewable. This is the closest pass of the Moon to Earth (356,954 km) since 1912.

There is the Transit of Venus across the Sun that will be partially viewable on June 5th in the evening from North America and in Europe the whole transit will be viewable on the 6th. This is a very rare conjunction of Earth, Venus and the Sun, which will line up in a near-perfect alignment and will not happen again during our lifetimes.

2004 Transit of Venus

The Solar Maximum for Solar Cycle 24 will peak late this year and early next year, which will result in increased activity from solar storms. For those of us in North America, these solar storms could have attributed to our warm weather this Winter and the warmest March on record, when warm air flowed from the Gulf of Mexico Northeast through the central and New England states. In contrast, Alaska, Europe and parts of Russia experienced their coldest Winter in what was perhaps hundreds of years.

As I have stated in the post below, our Sun’s poles are becoming asymmetric this month which has turned out to be a big surprise for scientists. I have found a few more articles talking about this, but for now I think everyone is just watching and waiting before they comment. This asymmetry is believed to have last happened during the Maunder Minimum of 1645-1715. (read more in the post below on Sun myths)

If you go looking for evidence of solar effects on the planet, there is a general trend of science to downplay the role of the Sun as compared to the effects humans are contributing to such as increased levels of CO2. There is evidence, as I point out in my post below, that our Sun’s magnetic field has an effect on weather here on Earth. It seems that an increase of solar activity helps stop incoming cosmic rays. Increased cosmic ray activity (seen in the Space Environment Overview chart within this post) can be linked to creating low precipitation clouds which have a cooling effect on our planet. Solar cycle 25 (beginning in 2020 or so) is predicted to be the weakest solar cycle in roughly 300 years.

I agree that humans are destroying habitat too fast, burning way too much fossil fuels and are probably already exceeding the carrying capacity of our planet. However, I am certain that our Sun, moon, planets and asteroids that make up our solar system and galaxy do have an effect on our planets’ ecosystem over time. Recent discoveries are showing that as our solar system moves through our galaxy, it sometimes comes close to supernovae remnants and that there is a correlation to life thriving on Earth when that happens.

To say that Earth exists in some human-controlled vacuum where we have much more influence than earthquakes, volcanoes and the cycles of our Sun is arrogant. After all, the Sun is 1,000,000 times the size of Earth and is essentially a giant nuclear explosion held together by gravity and magnetism.

To wrap up this post, I thought it would be fun to post some images related to Sun worship:

Use of References

This site uses references from NASA, Futurity, National Geographic and other scientific sites. I also use Wikipedia to reference many definitions and charts to familiarize readers with concepts. If you should have problems with Wikipedia reliability, I suggest that you examine the following: